The Collaborative Shut-Out

A Major-League baseball team had an intriguing game recently ... a collaborative no-hitter (or "shut-out"). Something like five or six different pitchers were involved for their team, ranging from a few innings to a couple batters faced, yet none allowed a hit by a batter of the other team. It was a new record for how many pitchers collaborated to make a no-hitter. It may have been a record as a collaborative event in baseball, but ... it's nothing new or unusual for Neuro-Typical conversations.

Friend and fellow "free-range Aspergian" Bryan made a comment a few posts back that for Neuro-Typicals (NT's for now?), conversations are essentially a collaborative process, rather than each person actually trying to communicate their thoughts individually. That conversations aren't composed of individuals sharing their own thoughts with the group so much as a "thought-process" being shared by the group.

Fragmental thoughts shared and combined as a collaborative thought process ... that is as NT as you can get. I think that is especially the form that general time-killing/filling conversations take among NT's. Someone starts things off saying "X" ... which may be either a complete "classical" sentence or two, or perhaps just a clause of a sentence, a fragment of a thought. Someone else will say some other little bit that in some way seems to them have something to do with the first thought-fragment; then another makes a similar fragmental comment but ... spun to something a bit different. Then someone else makes a comment that somehow takes off from the last fragment (but to what seems for us Aspy's a completely different subject matter), and the process repeats itself. Over and over.

As close to "normal" as I appear to most people, this sort of discussion is a LANDMINE waiting to explode around me (and all other Aspy's) any moment. It's based heavily on that shared data-flow of eye/vocal/facial/body/breath inflections that NT's gather without needing to think about, and which shapes their concepts of "what" the conversation is about each moment. 

Remember the explanation above ... the part where I noted the spins and take-offs to what seems a different subject matter? Think about any "general" conversation you are part of. The subject matter of the words does jump around a lot ... but yet in reality to the NT's, the conversation apparently continues without such a jump. All the NT's there seem to understand the links between the "apparent" jumps, or at least, understand that this shift in word-subject is simply part of continuing the same conversational pattern of the group. It is the pattern of  the conversation that is really the main shared communication. This group collaborative-talking process.

We Spectrumites may see some of the 'connecting' pieces between the fragments, and we may say something that feels a 'fit' to the other NT folks there. But no matter how hard we study NT's in real-life, in real-time we will miss probably 80% or more of the full information the rest of the group gets from each comment/commenter.There is no way we can track such complicated thought processes based on data we don't even "see". We're going to say something ... wrong.

I've studied such conversational patterns for many years now. I've had them analyzed and detailed for me by close friends and delightedly blunt enemies. For most of my life, the explanations have been given by people assuming that if I had half a brain and was actually concerned enough about other people and not so self-centered, I'd learn it ... quickly. And that the only reason for not gaining the understanding they were trying to teach to me was if I did not really want to learn how to get along with others. If I was ... selfish. Self-centered. A boor. Thoughtless. A pig.

After one is told this so many times, well, it must be true, right? John Elder Robison talks of how he heard the same comment so many times as a child, from SO many people (from school counselors and teachers to family members and strangers), that it must be true. However odd it seemed to him, they couldn't ALL be wrong. He was clearly a self-centered psychopath/ax-murder-in-waiting! He actually felt he should study which kind of prison he should "aim" for when he finally became what they all saw in him. Not because he felt any urge or inclination to become an ax-murderer/psychopath, but simply because EVERYONE around him couldn't be wrong, could they? (By the way, Federal prisons are better.)

Well ... they were wrong. John wasn't a self-centered psychopath in any way shape or form. His brain was just wired differently, so his interactions appeared differently and were misinterpreted by those around him. Seriously misinterpreted. But my corollary of the last post still applies: this is a two-way smash-up in progress. They misinterpreted him, just as he misinterpreted them.

And just as I and those around me do. And those wonderful little conversational jumps that aren't really jumps? I haven't a clue how they work to NT's. An NT says one set of words that (to me) completely changes the "apparent" subject matter of a flowing conversation ... but it isn't a change to the conversational pattern. Yet any slight change in "apparent" subject matter that I might provide is quite possibly going to be seen as a rude and dismissive commandeering of the group's conversation. With the other folks shaking their heads at how thoughtless I am.

I can't get it, and I certainly can't "win" at conversation either, though I've gotten better at fighting it to a draw or at least a stand-still. Participation is Hell on wheels, and staying aloof and "outside" is not much better. I know that if I say anything, eventually (and sooner rather than later) I will insult or anger someone or multiple someone's. Or at the least, I will be taken as thoughtless, boorish, self-centered, egotistical, and rude. If I don't say anything, eventually I will come across as either disinterested in others, ridiculously shy, or lacking in proper social graces by refusing to engage with others in "proper" social interactions. A self-centered boor by a different means.

But life is a participation sport, just like baseball. It's a "purist" sport, however. No designated conversationalists or relief-talkers allowed ... but oh well, many consider the designated hitter an apostasy even in baseball.